My workshop is currently located in a basement room and is my original do-it-yourself home improvement shop. Since there is limited space there my table saw and band saw are in my garage and a small woodworking bench for squaring, jointing, and planing with hand planes is in a separate basement room.

Home improvement projects are only mid way completed. Eventually two basement rooms will be gutted and reworked. One of these rooms will become the new woodworking shop. This room will be large enough to hold all machines and tools. Unfortunately the future woodworking shop is currently needed to handle storage overflow as one room after another of the house is reworked so it will be a year or two before all is done.

On the plus side, the shop will be gutted first then layed out rewired etc. with woodworking shop in mind. Looking foreward to the day I don’t have to move from one room to another depending on what operation I need to do on a piece of wood. Even more, I’m looking forward to improving my woodworking skills to produce workmanship that approaches some of the projects I’ve seen on this site and others.

I’ll try to get some pictures uploaded sometime soon. I want to eventually be able to look at the before and after when everything is finished, perhaps this can motivate me to finally take some pictures. Unfortunately the after pictures will be out in the future a bit. To many home renovation projects taking my time for the foreseeable future. Figure if I concurrently do small skill building woodworking projects I’ll be ready for bigger and better things when the final shop gets finished and the renovations are finished.

Tom, I can well understand about the home improvement projects taking up your time. My wife seems to believe that it is her mission in this life to find things to keep me busy. She seems to enjoy change for its own sake. But these “commissions” do have a plus side as well. You can always use the home improvement projects as leverage to put new tools in your shop. :)

-- Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful- Joshua Marine

Scott, I’ve had that trick figured out for a while. I’ve got a fair tool selection. Of course seems I can always think of few more that would make some upcoming job easier. Luckily she hasn’t reminded me that I’ve been telling her that I shouldn’t need anything else after I get these next few items (been saying that for couple of years actually). Perhaps she doesn’t say anything because she sees me using them so much (she helps a lot too and has some of her own tools). What I realy want to achieve is getting all the plumbing, electrical, and carpentry finished so I can concentrate on and learn to build good looking and useful furniture. The other big goal is to have a consolidated shop where I don’t have to go to three different locations depending on what tools is needed for the task.

Finally got some pictures of shop taken. The garage is still rather cluttered, an unfortunate transformation that seems to occur every winter. It’s normally much more orderly in the summer when I tend to work in it a lot more.

rando1, before my current bandsaw I had a 9” Ryobi bandsaw. I got it on sale for under a hundred dollars. Since I couldn’t really get any useful work out of it, I consider it based on dollars per amount of lumber cut to be quite an expensive saw.

This Jet 14” can handle up to a 12” resaw. I can’t even tell you how much I paid for it, but I remember it was on sale yet still was somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred. Now based on the amount of use I get out of this machine, based on dollars per amount of lumber cut. This is a far more economical saw than the Ryobi was.

A warning to all you guys. I use this argument with my wife to justify the cost of some of my tools and it has always worked. But, she’s pretty smart and now uses the same argument with me on things she wants. So use this method wisely ;-)